Days before Jeffery Carroll was sworn in as the interim D.C. police chief in January, his soon-to-be second-in-command Andre Wright sent an AI-generated video to his wife. The video, according to an internal report, showed Carroll puffing on a cigar and laughing while crowing, “The wicked witch is dead bitches. There’s a new sheriff in town.”
The message, sent from Wright’s department-issued cellphone, came amid the dramatic departure of former Chief Pamela Smith, who elevated Wright through the ranks and put him in charge of all of the department’s patrol operations. Wright and his wife, Inspector Natasha Wright, were among the 13 officials served termination papers last week in connection to the crime statistics scandal – but they had already been put on administrative leave months earlier, in March, for inappropriate text messages found on Wright’s work phone.
I reviewed an 18-page internal affairs synopsis of the investigation into Wright’s text messages with his wife, who works in the police department’s human resources department. The report shows that Wright repeatedly questioned crime classifications, solicited sex acts and derided colleagues and subordinates.
In one message, seemingly during a 9 a.m. meeting, Wright texted his wife, “This Big Tittie bitch can’t read.” In another, he appeared to reference a work trip as he wrote, “I’m going out of town with a fat ugly bitch, will be back tomorrow," followed by “I’m taking two midgets with me.” And after a March 2025 shooting in which a man had been shot in the leg, Wright texted his wife to “make sure this stupid mother fucka didn’t shoot himself and is lying.”
The D.C. police department is in turmoil over a 554-page report outlining a pattern of manipulating data in ways that falsely made the city look safer. Thirteen top officials face termination and Congress and the Justice Department are investigating. The officials are all on administrative leave pending the results of the department's disciplinary process, during which they can appeal the decision.
But the text messages represent a different outrage — and one that, beyond its prurience, reveals a lot about the police department. A search of Wright’s phone as part of the crime statistics investigation yielded messages that suggest the department's issues extend beyond data classification. Rather than a coordinated conspiracy, the messages make clear that the police brass accused of manipulation are at war with one another as well.
The texts are also a stark departure from the preaching persona Wright has built for himself as de-facto second-in-command of the department. At Smith’s farewell ceremony in December, Wright delivered a speech comparing their relationship to Paul and Timothy's in the Bible. He at times preached or prayed during D.C. police meetings, according to three law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. But in light of surfaced messages, as one official put it, his conduct seems like “striking hypocrisy.”
“To hear the sanctimoniousness from Chief Wright and Natasha Wright who were at best unprofessional and at worst downright scandalous… it’s just remarkable,” said Pamela Keith, an attorney for a captain accused of crime data manipulation. “It’s indicative of a complete absence of moral compass.”
Andre and Natasha Wright did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A D.C. police spokesperson said the Wrights are on administrative leave, but cited pending internal matters and declined to answer further questions, including whether Wright’s messages were indicative of the police department’s culture.
D.C. police also declined to answer why the report is dated January 14, 2026, but the Wrights were not placed on leave until March.
Crime classifications
Some of Wright’s messages discovered in January are also referenced in the 554-page internal affairs report on crime data manipulation first reported by The Washington Post. While investigators found that there was no evidence that Wright “specifically directed the misclassification of crimes on a large scale,” they pointed to some messages included in the January report to assert that “he was aware of, and supported, the practice.”
In one message, he sent his wife a screenshot of a section of the D.C. Code detailing the elements necessary to classify a crime as taking property without a right – a category investigators found was frequently abused to lower the number of reported thefts.
In another message, he reminded Natasha to ask a captain in the department about the classification. About a half-hour later, he texted her to follow up: “Have you been practicing? Did you reclassify that Theft?”
The internal investigations come after months of heightened scrutiny from President Donald Trump. Last summer, Trump took over the D.C. police force and cited out of control crime as justification. Critics pointed to the city’s plummeting crime rates, but Trump seized on long-circulated rumors that some police department managers regularly downgraded crime classifications to avoid being reprimanded by top brass.
The Justice Department and the House Oversight Committee conducted investigations, both of which railed against the leadership style of Smith and many of her inner circle. However, neither of the investigations identified a time when Smith or another leader explicitly ordered the misclassification of crime. Smith has denied wrongdoing.
A history of controversy
This is not the first time Wright has found himself embroiled in controversy. In 2021, his ex-wife reported he was having an affair with a subordinate lieutenant: Natasha, his current wife. And former D.C. Police Sgt. Charlotte Djossou, who recently self-published a book about the “narcissistic culture” within the department, told Washington City Paper that she had a “consensual sexual relationship” (including threesomes) with Wright while he was her superior and still married to his first wife.
The report shows Wright sent Natasha two links to Djossou’s Instagram profile on Dec. 13, 2025, the same day the 21-year veteran of the department posted about a TV interview she did alleging department leadership had been cooking the books for years. Djossou filed a whistleblower lawsuit in 2020 alleging the department retaliated against her for speaking up, and the lawsuit was settled last year.
Wright also sent his wife links to a court filing and news articles about the ongoing lawsuit brought against the police department by Capt. Paul Hrebenak, who alleges that Wright and other senior leaders retaliated against him for taking parental leave as a gay man.
Disdain for other officers
The Wrights also seemed to hold particular disdain for certain D.C. police leaders, including Cmdr. Michael Pulliam and Capt. Rachel Pulliam, who were also named in the crime data investigation.
Michael Pulliam was the first D.C. police official to be placed on administrative leave for allegedly downgrading crimes in May 2025. And both he and his wife were among the 13 officials served termination papers last week. In a lawsuit earlier this year, the couple claimed they are facing retaliation for pushing back against Smith and her inner circle, including Wright.
The month before Michael Pulliam’s suspension, Rachel Pulliam was abruptly transferred from the Youth and Family Engagement Division to midnights in the 7th District. She said this happened after she pushed back against then-chief Smith’s directive to rescind some detectives' approved time off.
Rachel Pulliam filed a whistleblower complaint, then Wright ordered Michael Pulliam to pack up her office. That prompted Michael Pulliam to file an equal employment opportunity complaint against Wright. A week later, he was put on leave.
Text messages surfaced in the January investigation show that Wright sent a photo of Michael Pulliam and other officials with the message, “He looks broken,” and, “He is fucked” on April 30 – the same week Pulliam filed a complain against Wright. Natasha responded with two laughing crying emojis.
In August, the report shows Natasha texted, “I just saw that liar Rachel.” The Wrights discussed seeing Rachel Pulliam with another police official, then said they pulled his internal investigation log numbers and “snitched” on him.
“They are royalty to the white boys… they all believe that we are in their way,” Wright texted.
Rachel Pulliam said seeing the texts was difficult, but also validated her feelings that she was being watched by the head of human resources and assistant chief.
“I felt the retaliation, I felt the hostility,” she said. “I felt like I was being gaslit into thinking that this wasn’t happening. And to see those text messages on a department phone so boldly targeting my husband and I after I made these protected disclosures… it was emotional.”
She said she was particularly disturbed by the fact that they appeared to open an investigation into a captain for speaking with her.
“That scares me because it sends this message to the rest of the department that not only should you not stand up for what’s right, but it might not just be your job, it could be everyone else’s around you.”
Soliciting sex
The most frequently discussed topic in the messages from the report by far – more than crime classifications, colleagues or Carroll – was sex.
In messages to his wife, Wright requests oral and anal sex, sends her old pictures of him and asks if she would have sex with “young Andre” and tells her she owes him “ghetto pussy” for shoveling snow out of two parking spaces.
Some of the messages become bizarre – a link to an Instagram video titled, “POV - You’re a Sassy Gay Recruit in the Academy Getting Pepper Sprayed,” and “Come suck on my toes, individually!!!!”
I would wager it’s the first time in D.C. police history that an internal affairs report has included a footnote explaining the term WAP.
